[Face-to-face cash]

I've been asking myself this question for a while now. We have to remember that Bitcoin is no longer an experimental payment method - it is now a competing currency and is now recognized to be a viable threat to the existing financial system.

I have no doubt that Bitcoin users are now under increased scrutiny by the government for many reasons - including to try and discredit them in order to hurt Bitcoin's image. Take a look at Charlie Shrem as an example.

How does a tinfoil-hat-wielding Bitcoin user cash out truely anonymously? I know that cashing out anonymously has been discussed many times before but there are problems with all of the methods I have seen.

What we want to do is convert to cash, just to be clear.

Face-to-face cash
The main problem is of course that the other party knows who you are (what you look like, phone number etc).

I was going to do a f2f trade with someone before, prior to the trade I background checked his username and the guy had posted online that he buys from Silk Road and hinted that he sold drugs. So when you meet someone they could very well be an amateur drug dealer. This is obviously very bad for many reasons, they could be under surveillance. What will the police think when they see a dealer handing you lots of cash?

I've refrained from doing f2f transactions because I do not like the thought of meeting a stranger. Where are the best places to meet? How do these usually go down? has anyone had any bad experiences?

Cash in the mail
Same problem as with f2f, the other party has your address and knows who you are. You could use a P.O. Box but you still need ID to open one. The other thing is its possible the cash is stolen in transit or intercepted. You are going to come under increased scrutiny if post office/customs see you are getting cash in the mail every week.

Western Union
I've never used WU before. What information do I need to give? How does the process work, what do I have to bring with me? Does WU give any guidelines on how they hold the information and under what circumstances they give it out?

Anonymous visa
There are a bunch of these anonymous visa cards going around which are issued by banks in Poland. It looks like people are somehow able to open accounts with fake details and they then send you the visa card in the mail. It's supposedly legal. It sounds great but I have heard of customs seizing the cards or even the bank disabling them. Does anyone know what the legality is with these?

Does anyone have any ideas or know how one can cash out truely anonymously? Please share your technique and if I like it I will tip you!

[you should be encrypting them]

I haven't been given access to the database yet but will need it very soon.

Wangbus is working on the new forum software. It's not clear whether he needs the database schema or content or just specific tables, but this post gave me quite a scare considering there are many users here who need high levels of privacy.

For example, one user here who is a government whistleblower claims that letters they sent to EU officials were intercepted by corrupt customs officials. This person uses Bitcoin for all of their finances due to their bank accounts being frozen and does most of their Bitcoin transactions via members of this forum. It's not farfetched to assume that the government involved would like to learn more about this persons finances.  It is also likely that there are other users here in similar situations who may not want powerful entities reading their PM's on this forum and I'm sure the majority of users have at least one message they would like kept private.

I have no reason to believe that this software development company would spy on private messages but the problem is we can't know for sure and on top of this we have no idea how the database will be handled. If they do require the database content and if the database is not properly encrypted before transfer to Slickage Studios or not properly destroyed after it is quite possible it could be obtained by a malicious entity.

It is also possible that spyware on an employee's machine may also be able to obtain the database - governments are known to use BIOS-based spyware which is almost impossible to detect and requires specialized hardware to remove.

This is an unnecessary risk so if you have private PM's - you should be encrypting them - but if you haven't been then I'd recommend deleting them from your inbox and sent folder and also PMing the recipients and have them remove them from their inbox and sent folder also. This will remove them from the live database so you won't be exposed to any unnecessary risk should they be given to the software development company. We should always assume the worst case scenario and hope for the best...

The scam accusations board has so many threads that its now unreadable.

I suggest we add sub-boards to keep it organized, for example:

Group-buy scams
Loan scams
"Hacks"
Fake beggars
Matthew N Wright
Fake ASIC companies
Ponzi schemes
Trusted users who have gone rogue
PayPal
Scamcoins (excluding shitcoins and trollcoins)

Do you want to see these subboards added?
Theymos has promised me if we hit 21 million yes votes he will implement them within "a year or so" at a cost of around $350k so please leave your vote in the poll!

Hey there folks

I am a web developer but unfortunately I have no graphic design skills at all.

I am seeking a graphic designer to design a PSD for my website. I do not have a budget in mind and I'm willing to pay any price that is justifiable. I do not need it to be spliced either, just the PSD will be fine as I can splice it myself.

I am looking for somebody who has experience so please send me links to any previous work you have done, and if possible please include proof that it's your work (due to to anonymous way of the internet!). If you don't have experience you can still PM me but you'll need to be very convincing!

I have a general idea what I'd like but I haven't fully decided yet so I'm seeking somebody experienced who will have a great idea for a design.

I am of course looking for someone who will accept payment in Bitcoin. I will however only use escrow. I will pay the full amount to said escrow before the work commences. I think Bitpop offers escrow and is familiar with this area so I will send him a PM and see if he's interested escrowing this. If you have somebody in mind to use as escrow who would be suitable let me know.

Just to add that I may also need a logo designed and if things go well I may have more web design work in the near future.

If you would like more information, send me a PM and I will send you my email address and Jabber. I prefer email as I am not on Jabber often and I also prefer to use GPG or OTR but it is of course not required

In December and January I paid a total of about $350,000 of forum funds to hire Slickage Studios, a software development firm. I plan to officially announce this on Monday. At the same time, the firm will start interfacing directly with the community to get ideas for the new forum. Not all ideas will be accepted, and the design will not be decided through voting, but the community's input will be seriously considered. Additionally, some people from the community will eventually be selected by me and others to participate in a development committee that will oversee the creation of the new software.

The estimated total time until SMF can be entirely replaced is 1 year, though pre-release versions of the new software will be available much earlier. In the meantime, I plan on continuing my (slow) development of our fork of SMF for at least ~9 months. I might upgrade to SMF 2.0 if this isn't too difficult. I hope that I will be able to enable avatar uploading and themes. I might hire someone to do a security audit, though perhaps the security bounties are sufficient. Despite past incidents (only one of which was actually due to a flaw in SMF), I feel OK about SMF's security while it's in the reduced-functionality state in which I have it in now.

I recently did a ton of accounting work (for tax calculation), so I can offer some statistics about the forum's finances up to 2013:
- Total income: 7731.42 BTC
- Income from donations: 3113.62 (58,546.99 USD at time of tx)
- Income from ads: 4617.80 (265,792.42 USD at time of tx)
- Total expenses: 929.09 BTC (+ 331.48 in 2014 so far)

As you can see, most of the forum's current wealth is from BTC value increases. USD income isn't so high.

I consider money that was donated to be earmarked for things like:
- Hosting expenses (currently zero)
- Server operation/development (such as a sysadmin, if one is ever hired)
- Legal expenses
- Software development
- Other things that are necessary for the forum itself to survive and thrive

I consider money obtained through ads to be unrestricted except that the money can't be taken as any kind of dividend. It must be used in reasonable non-profit ways. Currently, around 25% of monthly ad income is used to pay moderators. The forum's reserve of money is never used for this. In the future, I'm likely to use a large percentage of forum ad revenue and maybe even some unrestricted reserves to pay someone to work on Bitcoin Core full-time for a couple years. Donated money will never be used for this kind of thing -- that's only for operating the forum itself. (I probably would allow donators to move their donated funds into the unrestricted fund so that they can be used for things that are probably more useful.)

Who the fuck is Slickage Studios and why did he so easily part with that kind of monies without telling the community?
And a year? This is worse than BFL's "just two more weeks".

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/01/31/silk-road-vendor-filing-claim-for-seized-bitcoins-argues-he-sold-only-legal-items/

On Thursday, Ward began the process of retaining a lawyer to file a claim for what he says were 100 bitcoins–worth around $95,000 at current exchange rates–seized by the FBI in the takedown of the Silk Road online black market for drugs last October. Unlike most of Silk Road’s sellers, Ward says he earned his bitcoins through entirely legal means, offering the same merchandise that he advertises on the public Internet from his head shop Planet Pluto in Devon, England.

There were many legal sellers on Silk Road. I had money on deposit on SR at the time of the seizure for coin mixing purposes as the SR mixer was huge and provided a pretty good protection against taint analysis for the cost of transaction fees only. If my deposit was worth more I'd be doing the same thing.

Go PlutoPete! I'm so happy that it's him who decided to fight this. For those who don't know, PlutoPete was well known on SR he sold pipes, papers and bongs and had written before about how he registered his Silk Road business with tax authorities in the UK.

Also interesting:

All of that means the FBI, who were in communication with the NCA, should have considered Ward’s claim to some of the Silk Road bitcoins, according to Steven L. Kessler, an asset forfeiture lawyer who Ward is in the process of retaining. “The statute requires that if the government of the United States has knowledge of an individual with an asset subject to forfeiture, the owner has to get notice,” says Kessler.

ive been playing with 2 of 3 transactions recently.

i notice that if all 3 participants reuse their pub keys the escrow address always remains the same.

if 2 participants reuse their pubkey and just one changes it the escrow address changes.

Is there any disadvantage when 2 participants reuse a pubkey?

does this make the escrow address less secure?

does it make the escrow address less anonymous? for example could somebody who knew the two pub keys but not the third be able to figure out the escrow address?